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Ignoring Florida and Michigan Voters
Though I think the DNC’s goal of halting the ever-earlier progression of primaries is a righteous one, their execution of it is royally stupid. By stripping Florida and Michigan of their delegates, thereby marginalizing the voters in those states the DNC has made campaigning in the states during primary season worth very little. Indeed the democratic front runners all signed a pledge not to campaign in Florida in order to further shun the state for moving it’s primary election earlier. The candidates are missing a vital opportunity to court Florida voters and bring them to the democratic party. Sure, the nominee isn’t decided yet, but we know who the possibilities are; shouldn’t they be allowed to endear voters toward themselves?
As I said above, I do agree with the DNC goal of ceasing the one-up-manship that states are participating in, each trying to get their primary to be the first. Super Tuesday this year is during the first week in February, the same week that the New Hampshire primary was held in 2000. Primary season will be all but complete in 2008 at the time it was just beginning only 2 elections ago.
Drum Major Institute on the 2008 State of The Union
Searching for some numbers to go along with Bush’s final State of The Union address, I stumbled across this piece by the oddly-named Drum Major Institute. Their rebuttal covers the main points that were made presented with quotes from the speech alongside the DMI’s official riposte sound byte. Furthermore, the institute provides more in depth dissection of their position with (select) numbers to back up their retort. Being a biased response, the commentary doesn’t fully explore each issue, but that’s not to say it’s anything like Fox News biased.
The specific statistic I was searching for after hearing Robert Siegel or David Welna (I’m so old-school I listened to it on the radio) mention that Bush’s $18b cut of so-called useless programs from the federal budget was really a small change. Indeed it is, as the proposed federal budget is $2.9 trillion for 2008, making Bush vaunted cuts a mere .6%.
RIT Winter Sports
I have finally put a video on YouTube. This is people having fun in G and H lots during winter at RIT. Keith did the filming, I did the editing and the drivers are anonymous.
Off The Hook - 23 January 2008
The Data Loss of the Week award goes to GE Money, the credit card processing company used by JC Penny department stores, who lost information on 650,000 customers including social security numbers for 150,000 of those. The information was on a backup tape that was stored in a warehouse of Iron Mountain and went missing last October. Of course, the company reported that there was no reason to suspect the data was stolen nor used fraudulently. Mike mentions that, like most lost data incidents, a year of free credit monitoring will probably be given to the victims. Emmanuel wonders whether those given the credit monitoring service will be automatically billed for it after the year is up. Bernie S. uses a service after TD Ameritrade lost his information 3 months ago. He said that they did not take any billing information, so wouldn’t be able to charge him without his knowledge and likens it to the Do Not Call List, which is often abused by unscrupulous telemarketers. The Identity Theft Resource Center says that there was a 6 fold increase in the number of compromised records last year, a total of 125 million in 2007.
Emmanuel goes on a long tirade about his Verizon land-line phone bill, complaining about the charge for “Verizon Freedom Essentials,” which includes call-waiting ID, and anonymous call rejection, which is free. The big complaint is something marked as “discounted telecommunications service” which, though it sounds like a good and normal thing, is actually the name of a company, that charged him for directory assistance at a rate of $8.50 per instance. In order to get the charge removed, Emmanuel says the best tactic is to claim that the line is connected to a fax machine and that there is no way he could have made a call. A tangential discussion about the exorbitant cost and low quality of directory assistance leads Bernie to divulge his method of getting good advice for an area he knows little about: he simply calls a random number in the NPA and prefix that he is looking for information about. With a bit of social engineering, most people will recommend a business that suits your needs.
A North Dakota judge decided that performing a zone transfer is illegal if you don’t obtain authorization first. Bernie likens it to what he was arrested for, possessing equipment for the modification of telecommunications instruments for the unauthorized access to telecommunications services. His appeal was based upon the fact that the law didn’t specify who would give authorization for such modifications. Though a similar case, Mike clarifies that performing a zone transfer, getting all of the host in a domain, is trivial, requiring no special equipment and only common software. Furthermore, DNS servers can be easily setup to deny zone transfer requests. The same judge also said that compiling ‘whois’ lookups without permission from Network Solutions is also illegal.
The head of the European Union’s privacy regulators declared that IP addresses should be treated as personal information. Though Google and others maintain that an IP address only identifies a computer, the EU commissioner said that because most people use the same computers repeatedly, it was still personal information.
The Church of Scientology was DDOSed by “Anonymous” last week orchestrated as Project Chanology as a coordinated attack against Scientology. This is in response to a recent video of Tom Cruise which the Church of Scientology forced YouTube to take down. Gawker still has the video up, a good example of the Streisand Effect, which goes unmentioned on the show.
Time Warner has announced that it will start using usage-based billing, which Emmanuel likens as, “people who use the internet more will pay more and people who use it less will pay the same.” Bernie notes that Time Warner and Comcast both kick people off of their “unlimited” services if they cross a certain threshold of usage surmising that they don’t publish the limit because it would conflict with the advertising of the service as unlimited.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commision approved cyber-security standards to protect electrical utilities from attacks by hackers. A group representing electricity generators, the Edison Electric Institute recommended the standards, “following growing concerns about the security of utilities.” A senior CIA analyst, Tom Donahue, is quoted as saying, “hackers literally turned out the lights in multiple cities after breaking into electrical utilities and demanding extortion payments before disrupting the power.” He refused to elaborate about where, when or how long the outages lasted only that they were outside the United States. A video from last year, the Aurora Generator Test, blew this out of proportion last year showing simulated hackers causing a generator to explode.
A cocaine vaccine was announced; Emmanuel and notkevin up the Orwellian implications such as parents giving it to their children which is an admission that their children might try cocaine in the future.
Sprextel and T-Mobile were denied hearing of a case by the supreme court dealing with an 11th circuit decision that would force them to add taxes into the pricing of their plan, rather than listing them separately.
Cellphones were used to steal merchandise at a WalMart on Long Island.
FBI wiretaps were halted after the bureau failed to pay bills on their lines. Bernie brings up the incredible cost of wiretaps, stating that a single wiretap can cost more than $10,000 which all comes out of taxpayers pockets.
Untraceable, a soon to be released action film about internet snuff films, seems to advocate against net-neutrality.
A listener calls asking for a recommendation of an MP3 player that will also tune AM stereo and Bernie recommends the Pogo RadioYourWay.
Redbird responds to a listener’s question about anti-virus for smart phones, saying that it’s really not necessary.
Regular Expressions in Java
Perl is my favorite language in part because of the fluidity with which regular expressions fit in. To loop through a file grabbing content out of matching lines is absolutely trivial:
my @found; for my $line () { # Match lines and capture 'jazz' and everything that follows if ( /match this (jazz.*)$/ ) { # Save the captured stuff in an array push @found, $0; } }
Most other languages make such matching more difficult and Java is one of them. Like in Python, regular expressions must first be compiled before they can be used for matching. This multi-step process is significantly more cumbersome and if I haven’t dealt with it for any length of time, I have to look up the procedure. Here’s a quick rundown of the same matching from above, this time in Java:
String regex = "match this (jazz.*)$"; Pattern myPattern = Pattern.compile( regex ); Vectorfound = new Vector(); String line = null; while ( (line = infile.readLine()) != null ) { Matcher myMatcher = myPattern.matcher( line ); if ( myMatcher.find() ) { found.add( myMatcher.group(1) ); } }
That’s a bit of a hassle.
Top Gear Parkour
Top Gear did a Man v. Machine segment a few months ago pitting a Peugeot 207 against a couple of traceurs. It was a very entertaining clip and showed some good parkour moves as well. If you’re interested in parkour, however, even more interesting is a short video on the site of the Worldwide Jam street team about the making of the Top Gear segment. Unsurprisingly, each shot was done separately, some of them with some stunt assistance such as mats.
Off The Hook - 16 January 2008
The Off The Hook site takes a while to post synopsis of the episodes and once they are posted, the overviews aren’t very detailed. I’m going to start taking some notes as I listen to the show and putting them here, for the good of all internet denizens who may find this via Google.
Emmanuel noted that the theme was missing, so he was playing it from a recording of the show that he downloaded last week. Mitch Altman, who was returning from the Chaos Communication Congress and is the creator of the TV-B-Gone, was on again; he and Emmanuel discussed Gizmodo’s use of the device at CES.
Emmanuel noted a new program in California that will allow utilities to control home thermostats via radio signals as a method for reducing peak energy usage so as to mitigate rolling blackouts. Not Kevin wonders how long it will take until someone finds a way to control the temperature of their neighbor’s house.
A kid in Lodz, Poland created a remote control to control the trams in the town. Not Kevin and Mitch discuss whether the remote that the kid created was really like a TV remote employing infrared as was reported. Emmanuel compares it to a chrome box and Bernie points out that infrared isn’t a very robust method, susceptible to weather conditions that could hamper its operation.
Wisconsin contracted out a mailing to EDS who printed social security numbers on the outside of envelopes. Bernie notes that the government officials always preach their concern for citizen’s privacy and guesses correctly that all those affected will receive a free year of credit monitoring, only to be automatically enrolled in such a service for a significant charge at the end of said year.
The TSA took down a horribly insecure website intended to allow people to remove themselves from the no-fly list. The contract for the site was awarded to Desyne Web Services by a TSA employee who previously worked for the firm.
Boeing’s new 787 aircraft, which will have internet access available, is going to be thoroughly check to ensure that the internet link is in no way connected to the plane’s avionics. Bernie mentions Boeing’s ill-fated Connexion service.
Bernie talks about a new hacker space, The Hacktory, which he is helping to put together as an extension of the Philadelphia Make group. Mitch talks about visiting Bootlab in Berlin, TMP LABS in Paris and c-base as well as DC401 in Providence and NoiseBridge. Emmanuel brings up past hacker spaces L0pht and New Hack City that eventually failed and questions whether these new ones will last.
Code Golf: Grid Computing
A new puzzle went up on Code Golf a few weeks ago and I finally got some time to sit down and hack on it, so here’s another annotated instalment of my pruning process. I haven’t gotten anywhere near the smallest solutions which are half of my 109 characters. See the action below, but don’t look if you don’t want hints!
Initially, a straightforward for loop that reads from standard input or a passed file; huzzah for Perl’s built-in flexibility. Within this loop, a counter, $n, is incremented to fill an array, @c, with the sum of each column; the sum of the row is stored in $r. At the end of each iteration of the loop, the greatest row sum, $a, is set to the just-completed row if said row is greater than what has been seen previously or the answer is undef, as it is the first time through. The lower loop puts the greatest column sum into $b.
My first pass through is 190 characters:
for (<>) {
$n = $r = 0;
for (split ' ', $) {
@c[$n] += $;
$r += $_;
$n++;
}
1
$a = $r if ($r > $a);
}
for (@c) {
$b = $_ if ($_ > $b);
}
($b > $a) ? print $b.$/ : print $a.$/;
Note that Perl is flexible; by using <>, input can be passed as a file on the command line or via stdin. With some quick re-ordering of the top loop and turning the lower loop into a map, 20 characters are saved. 170 characters:
for (<>) {
$n = $r = 0;
@c[$n++] += $, $r += $ for (split ' ', $_);
1
$a = $r if ($r > $a);
}
map {$b = $_ if ($_ > $b)} @c;
($b > $a) ? print $b.$/ : print $a.$/;
Much of the whitespace can be removed (though I’ll leave the newlines for now). Down to 138 characters:
for(<>){
$n=$r=0;
@c[$n++]+=$, $r+=$ for split' ',$_;
$a=$r if $r>$a;
}
map{$b=$_ if $_>$b} @c;
$b>$a ? print $b.$/ : print $a.$/;
The print can be simplified, dropping 6 characters:
for(<>){
$n=$r=0;
@c[$n++]+=$, $r+=$ for split' ',$_;
$a=$r if $r>$a;
}
map{$b=$_ if $_>$b} @c;
print $b>$a ? $b.$/ : $a.$/;
At which point I’m stuck. After beating out the last bits of whitespace, that is 109 characters.
Dictatorial Leadership is Sometimes the Best
While writing some Python code today I came to a point where a switch might have been appropriate. Knowing that switch statements, like any control structure, differ amongst languages I ran a quick search and came up with this Python Enhancement Proposal. The first paragraph of that page is a rejection notice which states, quite simply, “A quick poll during my keynote presentation at PyCon 2007 shows this proposal has no popular support. I therefore reject it.” Wow, that’s quite a unilateral decision; I looked at the author, “‘guido at python.org”’ and thought, “that’s certainly his prerogative,” for, if you recall analogies from the SAT, Guido van Rossum : Python :: Linus Torvalds : the Linux kernel.
As I pondered Python’s lack of this control statement I began to think, well, this probably is the best way for something like Python to be run. Python is a language that has many passionate follows, many of whom would jump at the chance to make their mark by extending the language. If the development model allowed anyone to add to it without due process, the language would quickly become cluttered and useless. No project would ever be run this way, but there are many that employ a loose committee to make such decisions. Even in that case, however, the committee would certainly waste much time hemming and hawing over the best way to implement the switch and other minutia. Having a single person in charge makes such project control simple. Guido, who we can assume is an experience programmer with a good handle on the craft, hence the fact that he created Python and is affectionately known as the Benevolent Dictator for Life. He simply explored the possible options, asked around to see whether this really was a lacking feature of Python and then decided. End of story.
First Impressions from Campaign Websites
Ron Paul is an internet celebrity in the realm of campaign fund raising and for good reason: his campaign has garnered $19.5 million in donations in the fourth quarter, $6 million of that on the December 16th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. The news media never fails to mention his internet popularity and the fact that the majority of his donations stem from the tubes that run the new world. When I went to check out Ron Paul’s website and that of some other candidates, I was intrigued. Users who go to the Super Libertarian’s internet presence are presented with a clean and informative site:
Top and center is useful information, in this case the time until the upcoming caucus in Iowa and primaries in New Hampshire. The site includes information about his fund raising effort, links to donate and a form for getting campaign update emails below the fold. Visiting other campaign sites is a different story:
When you visit the websites for HIllary Clinton or Barack Obama you are asked for contact information before seeing anything substantive. You have to fill out the form or click through to get to the candidate’s website. Thankfully, their websites send cookies; subsequent visits forgo the information garnering forms whether or not you put in anything. But why put up this stumbling block? Ron Paul’s site is much more elegant; the form for signing up to get campaign information is still easy to get to, but it’s not intrusive.